Things That Do Not Disappear

By Roger Rosenblatt

They would not go away, those pushy women circling the Plaza de Mayo silently, as if under water, photographs of their sons, daughters and husbands swinging on chains from their necks like good-luck charms. Sometimes the women would bear the photographs on placards; sometimes they would hold a snapshot delicately out in front of them between the index finger and the thumb, presenting unassailable proof to anyone who cared to look that the subject of the picture did, at one time, exist. Every Thursday the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo performed their half-hour ritual across the street from the presidential Pink House, and then dispersed for a week. But they would not go away. In many of the photographs the children posed formally, in dresses and coats and ties. In several, they looked saucy before the camera. That was in better days, before the subjects came to be counted among the desaparecidos; thousands, possibly tens of thousands of men, women and children who, as alleged enemies of the state, disappeared under the military government of Argentina in the late 1970s.

Not that they really disappeared. Even the powerful Argentine generals, with so many instruments of annihilation at their fingertips, could not actually make people disappear. They did what they could: abduct, torture, shoot, behead and bury their enemies in mass and secret graves. What they hoped most recently, since ending their "dirty war" of antiterrorism. was that the issue of the desaparecidos would itself disappear. If the newly elected President of Argentina, Raul Alfonsin, had any sense of custom or propriety, that is precisely what would have happened. But Alfonsin seemed unaware that one does not put the military on trial; and, in any event, graves seemed to be popping up all over the countryside at an alarming rate; and there were those irritating women, of course, relentless ambulatory photograph albums. So the issue never did disappear. It must be very discouraging for the military, all that work for nothing.

They could not even dispose of the bodies, and bodies are the easiest part to dispose of. Murderers do it frequently, with a tub full of acid; even the teeth will go eventually. Ideas are something else, however. Much more difficult to get rid of them. Memories are peculiarly tenacious. Hitler may have discovered as much after the German High Command issued its Nacht und Nebel decree in the western occupied territories, enabling authorities to snatch citizens off the street and out of their homes under night and fog. "The prisoners will vanish without a trace," read the decree. They did not. They were traced in the minds of those who survived. Feelings are still harder to dispose of. The Argentine mothers were not patrolling the Plaza de Mayo in the name of revolutionary ideas, but because they missed those they love.

The trouble is that people simply will not disappear. There is too much stubbornness in them, too great a propensity for self-assertion. Langston Hughes' comic character, Jesse B. Semple (known as Simple in Hughes' newspaper column), once boasted that he had been "cut, stabbed, run over, hit by a car, tromped by a horse, robbed, fooled, deceived, doublecrossed, dealt seconds . . . but I am still here." Not even death weakens such a stand. The power of ghosts is that they manage to retain their place in the world in spite of the final obstruction; they insist on their presence. A simple matter, but a basic one. We will do anything to stay around, and to keep others around as well, by way of monuments, ceremonies, books. During the Stalinist terror, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova stood in line at the Leningrad prison off and on for a period of 17 months. One day she was approached by a woman "with lips blue from the cold," who, like Akhmatova, was waiting for news of the fate of someone in the prison.

"Can you describe this?" the woman asked the poet. Akhmatova said she could. "Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face."

If one is truly intent on making others disappear, he is far more likely to succeed by killing his enemies outright and announcing the deed publicly. Then at least one deals out certainty, which will probably be followed by despair. By creating "disappearances" in Argentina, the military leaders not only engendered a feeling of national absence and brooding but raised a question of logic. Gone? How can anyone be gone nowadays in our small, interconnected, excessively communicative modern world? Instead of a nation of mourners, the generals created a nation of snoopers, all pawing at the ground for bones.

One wonders in the end why they don't go away--little tyrants, grand tyrants--all repeating themselves from year to year, reaching the same unimaginative decision about obliterating their impediments. The idea has simplicity to recommend it. "Nothing will come of nothing," King Lear told one of his daughters. He was wrong, of course. Everything comes of nothing in King Lear, as it tends to elsewhere, Argentina included. Technically the desaparecidos are nothing; the conscience and resolve of the new administration are nothing. Because of such nothings, former President Bignone is in prison this week.

On the basis of those nothings does Alfonsin hope to make his nation reappear. Working toward nothing, the former leaders got rid of most left-wing terrorism in Argentina, but in terms of a stable government or a content citizenry, they achieved nothing. Perhaps they are most comfortable in the presence of nothing. Perhaps their wish from the start was to survey a wasteland from atop a reviewing stand, exquisitely alone in a world where everyone else has disappeared.

But the women of the Plaza would not let them have such a world, intruding upon them week after week. Strange figures, ghosts hunting for ghosts. Did they do it all as a political protest, or did they think that their husbands and children might actually be recognized, and returned to them safely? Do they think that still? They had nothing to hope for, they walked in a circle, and they said nothing, by which they restored much that had gone away from Argentina. --By Roger Rosenblatt